Form Fury

There are a couple of things guaranteed to arouse my temper. The first is housework which I hate because it's so inevitably necessary, and anything that predictable is bound to annoy me. The second is form-filling, which I've had to do quite a bit of recently what with the boys joining a new summer playgroup and starting new schools.

Today's one was for my eldest's new school, and was, in places pretty incomprehensible. I shall just have to take it, incomplete, and plead the ignorance of a foreigner, hope they take pity on me on June 18, the ONLY day for enrollment, and finish it then.

On the Apprentice last night the remaining 5 were being grilled on their form-filling and CVs. The interviewers looked quite terrifying. They found all the weak spots in the candidates' pages, exploited them by asking pertinent questions, and reduced most to silence as their lies or half-truths were revealed.

We discovered that Katie considers herself quite ruthless, that stealing someone else's husband counts as 8/10 on her scale of ruthlessness, and that she was ultimately just playing a game. Luckily, she came back down to earth in time to realise what she was getting herself into, and extricated herself before she did any more damage. The most loathed candidate is now no more, to general relief.

Simon and Kristina are the two finalists. Simon was apparently a member of MENSA at the age of 13. Frankly, having seen him over the last ten weeks, I find that difficult to believe. His intelligence must be straitjacketed in a narrow band of IQ problem-solving, and completely out of its depth in real life. He has little common sense and seeing his behaviour in some of the activities, as a manager was just hilarious - wrong decisions, pig-headedness, and disregard of his team mates - and all so much harder to accept with such a brain.

Kristina, despite some terrible mistakes during the series, has come out as a front-runner. What I like about her is that, although she had a son as a teenager, she didn't become a social security statistic, but went out to work, went to university, and made a good life for him, whilst working slowly but surely at her own career. He has now gone to university, and she has declared that she is ready to show the world what she is capable of - it's Kristina Time. She comes across as very mature, as she would be with her track record of doing the best for her son before she went out to take the world by storm.

She also came out best in the interviews. The interviewers were unanimous in their appreciation of her qualites as a person as well as her professional capabilities. I wonder if she got in a temper when she was filling out the Apprentice forms...